Earlier, James wrote an entry describing how to use the Outlook Attachments Viewer to manage your Outlook attachments. This is a great way to control your mailbox size, as a high percentage of this is almost always found in a few big attachments.

There’s also a way to do this inside Outlook itself, by using Search Folders. What we’ll do is create a Search Folder with no filters. (click the pic to see a larger image) This will create a folder that contains every piece of mail in your mailbox. Once this is done you can sort by size by clicking the top of the size column. Now delete what you want, save what you want, and in no time flat you’ve removed many dozens (hundreds?) of megabytes from your mailbox. Here’s how you do it in Outlook 2003:

Click File / New / Search Folder.
Scroll down in the selection box and choose “Create a custom Search Folder”.
Click the Choose… button.
Type All Mail in the Name field.
Click the Browse… button. Make sure the upper-leftmost checkbox (Mailbox – Your Name) is selected and none of the child checkboxes are selected.
Click OK.
In the Custom Search Folder dialog click OK.
See a warning saying “you have not specified any crieteria…”. This is fine because we want all messages in this folder. Click Yes.
In the New Search Folder dialog click OK.

Your new folder is now created. This may take some time to create. I haven’t been here that long and don’t have too much junk in my mailbox yet, so it only took a few seconds. When this is done you’ll see it as a subfolder on the left under the Search Folders folder. Open it up and click the top of the Size column which will sort by size. Find the biggest emails you have and go to town.

So I was wandering around the internet the other day and stumbled upon a neat little program to help one get control of their email attachments. It’s called OutlookAttachView. It makes a sortable list of your email attachments, and from there you can delete or save them.

You can download it yourself, but we’ve installed it on the network for you. Just click here select open or run to the window that pops up and it will create an icon on your desktop. It’s a great way to clean out the attachments that are hogging your Outlook email space. Note that if you have a lot of attachments, it may take several moments for the list to be resorted when you click on column headings.

I should note that I found it on Lifehacker, a wonderful blog that features helpful computer tips and tools.